Is it possible to run big game servers like World of Warcraft in the Cloud like Amazon or Windows Azure?
Let's say tomorrow morning I start a game company, is it possible for me the entrepreneur to have all my big IT infrastructure who run the game like the game server (the realms players log on to play on) in the cloud? And all the others services servers too for the business in the cloud? Except the workstation the artist and programmer work on day to day in the business...

For example there is like 100 servers called realms in Warcraft (or Rift or Star Wars) that players log on to play in north America, could they be all virtualized in 100 virtual machines running windows server 2008 r2 or linux in windows azure or Amazon Cloud services ???? Since once the game is installed locally and players play there is no super big bandwidth consumption could it work? Would it require huge sql database or intense system resource for windows azure to track everything out? Let's say it cost even 100 000$ a month on windows azure, it's still cheaper than building and running your own 100 small personal server yourself no? I played with some of the pricing on windows azure and it goes as high as 10 000$ didn't try all the scenarios.

Thanks a lot I would love a in deep answer and advices thank you very much everyone.

Kaven

I think you could get it to work, given enough time. There is a bit of research and legwork you'll have to do first. What kind of access do you have to the server? What happens if there is downtime? What services can you and can you not run on the server? etc.

The other "challenge" will be getting your infrastructure to scale. If you're using SQL databases for housing the state of the game, you'll eventually overload the database and you'll want to do network load balancing. To get load balancing to work across databases, you'll need to have them doing mirror replication between each other so that the game world is consistent regardless of which database you're connected to.

You'll also want to have a seperate server which hosts the game world. And probably another server to handle the incoming client connections (and rejects/bans certain IP's, especially if they're behaving maliciously)

My advice would be to get a test environment up and running at home or in your office. Figure out how you want to get your infrastructure working and talking. Then, depending on your expected public reception, start with a small number of servers and scale over time to slightly exceed the load and not break the piggy bank. If you need to expand to more servers, you'll likely have cashflow which can be reinvested in more infrastructure.

You should also look into what your cloud computing provider will and won't do for you, and look at any of the gotchas. Would your "server" be a virtual machine which is hosted on a physical machine which is also hosting other virtual machines you have no control over? What if your VM needs and uses up all available resources (RAM and CPU)? Could you get more? What if a neighboring VM uses 100% of their CPU and it affects your performance? Would your provider charge you more if you're always running at 100% load? Would they give you more CPU & RAM if you needed it? What would be the cost for the additional resources? Considering your cashflow, when would it become more economical to host and run your own servers?

Zynga had their games almost entirely on Amazon [s]S3[/s] [color=#696969]EC2 ([size=2]thanks zer0wolf), until a year or so ago (now they are mostly running their own center, partly relying on Amazon as backup, AFAIK).

Yes, you can run an MMO entirely from the Amazon EC2. As Servant of the Lord pointed out, Zynga initially did that. The thing is though is cost of scale. Up to a certain point, it will be more cost effective to go with cloud service like Amazon, due to cost of paying for servers and employees to manage the service. There is a break even point though, where is becomes more cost effective to do everything yourself. The zCloud is built specifically for the needs of the games Zynga releases, so they're able to get away with a lot less servers than would be needed with Amazon's EC2.

Every company's hardware needs will be different though, so that break even point can certainly vary.